To Print?

An important question to ask - who is going to supply your printing? You have three options for this:

Print yourself

Get an independant lab to print

Use Ultimat

As always there are advantages and disadvantaged of all three options and we will transparently map them out so that you can make an informed decision.

Print Yourself

The advantages of this are clear. On the surface it will give you the cheapest method of printing and will offer you the greatest control over the output. The disadvantages are similarly quite obvious too. Firstly there is the capital outlay on a printer and even moreso the inks. For example to fill our Canon 8300 with ink it costs in excess of £2500! Unless you are printing often (and we mean more than once a week!) it is unlikely to be cost effective once you take other costs into account. For example to ensure colour accuracy we spend more than £1500 per year on keeping our colour profiles in tip top shape. Print heads which are a consumable often forgotton run out at £350+ each (and there are 2!) and maintenance tanks also require replacement. In total we spend around £2500 per year, per printer not including ink to ensure we can offer a qualiy service.

Use an independent lab

This is a good alternative to self-printing. If you are already using a lab they should be happy to send prints to us on your behalf. The only point with this is that we would ask for prints to be clearly labelled by your lab so that we know who they belong to when they arrive. An other advantage is that the labs offer free colour correction if this is important to you. The drawbacks really only come down to logistics. Having an independent lab may slow the process down slightly. We do get frequent damage from deliveries direct from labs which they have to get re-printed and re-sent which adds to delays. Also, there is always the possibility of something happening out of control of the lab which could cause a problem. For example a couple of years ago, snow came down across the country hitting Scotland hard which meant that Loxley's were unable to get any prints sent out for a number of days in December which ultimately caused some tense moments with customers!

Using Ultimat

The advantages are clearly that you can get everything done in one place! If a print gets damaged in the process, we just reprint it and you would be none the wiser with no delay suffered. Similarly if you have an urgent requirement, and these things do happen, we can act quickly to service the needs of the cient. The only disadvantage is that we are not a lab and hence do not offer all of the services a lab may, such as colour correction and the supply of countless small prints. For futher information on our printing please visit the printing page which will elaborate on what we offer.